


just breathe

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Smith/Wesson, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angels are Dicks, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Ghosts, I Don't Even Know, I'm Bad At Summaries, M/M, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Smith and Wesson hit the road, Weird Plot Shit, or something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 09:06:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7928929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where Smith and Wesson hit the road, trying to hunt monsters, Sam Wesson keeps dreaming of Dean Winchester battling monsters, and Dean Winchester just misses his brother.</p>
<p>(That's the most confusing summary I've ever written)</p>
            </blockquote>





	just breathe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amberdreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amberdreams/gifts).



> Written for [amberdreams](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com/), for the prompts ghost/living person AU and Starcrossed lovers AU. I am not sure who the star-crossed lovers here are, exactly: maybe all combinations of them.

“We were here,” Sam says, when they roll into that sixth town on Sunday. “Hunting something. I don’t remember what, but we were here.”

Smith’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel, his eyes far away. “Motel?”

“Yeah.”

Sam watches him out the corner of his eye. Smith’s mouth is set in a grim line, his jaw hard, and he refuses to really look at Sam. This has been going on for a while, now. Their road-tripping days are mostly good, Smith playing pretentious hip-hop and club mixes and eating salads, Sam sneaking in classic rock, wheedling him to _try_ a cheese-burger, making him stop at all the stupid roadside attractions. Smith goes along with most of it, good-natured, reveling in his ‘ _Eat, Pray, Love’_ phase as he calls it, only rarely worrying about how he’s going to build his career back up when it’s over. It’s only the three magic words— _we were here—_ that seems to fuck Smith up.

“Okay—here’s a motel.”

Sam sucks in a deep breath when he sees it. It’s familiar. “Shit.”

Smith idles the car in front of it. “I’m guessing this one?”

“Yeah.”

Smith’s face falls. Sam feels a swooping sensation in his stomach, akin to nausea, or disappointment, and hates himself.

They check in. Smith has expensive whiskey, the kind that comes in multi-faceted, shimmering bottles—he downs shots of it, four in quick succession, while Sam wanders the tiny room from end to end, vague impressions of a bag full of guns and a wall full of notes swimming under the surface of his mind, the memory slippery like an eel. The wallpaper has a nautical print; he runs his hand over a patch, and there’s blood there in his memory.

“Anything?”

Smith is sitting on the edge of his bed, shoulders tense. His fingers are steepled, nails digging into his knuckles.

“I don’t know,” says Sam, hesitant, touching the wall. “I think something happened here.”

“Huh.” Smith brings out an EMF meter. It’s apparently the _real deal_ —he got it off some specialist dealer selling it on the deep web, had to put it on his platinum credit card. Now it lights up, all lights flashing. “Look at that.”

“I can feel him,” says Sam. He shivers, despite the room being too warm.

“Do you—” says Smith, and then grinds whatever he’s saying to a hard stop. Period. Or elliptical, because he opens his mouth again, before shaking his head and settling into silence.

Sam goes to sit beside Smith. Outside, the sky’s blue and dappled white, an innocent color. Smith would belong to that kind of sky, would belong in some golden-sand beach somewhere, his careful tan and cultivated muscles and freckles like flicks of butterscotch.

Sam belongs…he doesn’t know. Somewhere else. Somewhere toothier.

“Are you—will you try and see him?”

“You know that I—I have to see. I have to know.”

“Yeah,” says Smith. He swallows hard. “Are you—are you gonna lie down?”

Sam lets his eyes flit away. “Yeah. Yeah—okay.”

The motel sheets feel coarse beneath him. Smith kneels above him, locking him between his knees, his fingers fluttering butterfly-soft at Sam’s neck. Sam guides his hands to the right spot, presses down on them lightly, and Smith gives him a curt nod. He looks down at Sam, and he’s beautiful—with this sharp intent coloring his expression, he looks more like Dean than ever.

Sam looks at the lines of Smith’s face, his strong jaw, his startlingly colored eyes, and thinks of all that’s missing instead. It’s like Smith is vacuous poetry, all rhyme and rhythm missing, some hack writer’s attempt at sounding real. A mask, or a sculpted face, anatomically perfect but missing the vital force of the person it is modeled on.

It’s not fair. Smith should be his own person. Smith _is_ his own person—a great person. And Sam is…well, Sam is probably just an asshole.

“You sure about this, Wesson?”

Sam nods. There’s a pattern on the ceiling, painted by water, the marks of many rains and leaks. He forces himself to look at it as the pressure builds, the fingers at his throat bruising now, cutting off his air. His self-preservation kicks in despite himself, and his hands find Smith’s elbows, scrabble faintly at them, but Smith is strong. The Rorschach pattern on the ceiling seems to elongate, fade, many storms subtracting from it, disappearing now.

This is probably not the strangest thing that has ever happened in this room. If you take parallel worlds or duplicate universes into account, that is. But—if Sam were to separate himself from this body, become disembodied, and look down from a new vantage, this would _look_ pretty strange. Or it would just look like sex—which is the tragedy, Sam guesses, that so many thinks that aren’t can so easily be distilled down to sex.

Smith has stopped looking at him. The TV is behind him, spilling canned laughter, and it reflects in Smith’s eyes. They’re glassy, doll-like. Sam feeds a sudden sweep of sympathy for him, a deep and welling love, and that makes him so afraid he can’t speak of it.

Smith goes harder, puts his shoulders into it, his face a grim mask of forced disinterest. His fingers form a vice at Sam’s throat, and the world starts to swim, and Sam kicks out, desperate.

It shouldn’t feel the way it does, but his world has gone unwieldy in the past few months, and now Sam doesn’t fight the warmth that spreads through his chest, the hunger for something unnamable, only made stronger by his gasping, horrific hunger for air.

Inside him something bubbles, colors burst and spills away wax-like. Sam thinks of drowning, of wax gluing his pores, clogging up his throat. He thinks of ectoplasm, cold as hell apparently, and then he thinks of hell, and he thinks of angels, and he panics.

There’s no reprieve. Sam can’t breathe. There’s no air left in him, and the world spins faster, faster. The ceiling tilts; crashes down on him. His heart stutters, and a sort of blur takes over his brain, and then he’s falling, falling—Smith swimming away now, the motel room swimming away—nothing but soft, amniotic blackness surrounding him.

*

“Hey, Sam,” says Dean, quietly, “Hey. Hey.”

His mouth is cold against Sam’s, his fingers cold on Sam’s face. Sam breathes in, smells metal and gunpowder, a soft tang of blood. Dean leans his forehead against Sam’s, mumbles something quiet. Sam finds himself holding onto the collar of Dean’s shirt, running his hands over his shoulders.

He feels solid, _real._

“Dean,” he says, softly. Dean’s tongue plunders his mouth. He tastes like static.

“I missed you,” says Dean, when Sam runs out of breath.  

It’s the same motel room—same nautical theme, only with blood on it this time, a body slumped against the wall without a head, the toothy head sitting above the TV. There’s a laptop in the corner, guns spilling out of a duffel on one bed, and Dean—covered in blood, grinning happy _Dean—_ sprawled over him on the other. The monster’s dry blood is crusted on Dean’s cheek. Sam scrapes at it with his fingertip.

“Where are we?”

“Don’t you remember? Nest of vampires, awesome pie-joint next door…”

“Waitress with the pink hair?”

“HBO Sunday.”

“Hmm,” says Sam. “I remember.”

The memories are flashes, strangely hued—they’re not his. It’s like the ghost of Sam Winchester whispers these things in his ear, cold comfort for his lonely brother.

They stay on the bed for a while, quiet. Dean asks him about his trip. Smith has an Instagram account, Sam tells him. He put pictures of Salvation Mountain on them, and got a 1000 little hearts from all the career-hopefuls that followed him there from LinkedIn. They were thinking of seeing the Joshua trees next; far out in the desert. Highway 62, all those rocks like prehistoric rockets awaiting countdown, the desert’s intense _space._ Smith is a little excited about that: probably because it is unlikely Sam and Dean Winchester ever worked a case out there in the land of yucca blooms and trees that look like alien spawn.

Around the lamp in the room falls the bodies of moths hiding from the rain, quiet like drops.

“Let’s go out.”

Rain in this otherworld is glittering, sparking off Dean’s shoulders. It hits the black car parked in the motel’s lot, turning her into a sleek, shining thing, dangerously beautiful to look at. The world is dark in a primitive, proto-human way, their room’s the only light burning for miles. If it wasn’t so stormy, the Milky Way would dome the sky above them, coyotes would howl a nightly symphony. As it is, it is quiet. Only the mutter of television and canned laughter from the next room.

Sam thinks a soft, stray thought about Smith sitting in a motel room, watching TV with his eyes glassed over, and feels an ache in his ribs, a burn in his eyes.

“Smith says he can feel my pulse at his fingertips now. All the time.”

Like a phantom heart, held between his palms.

Sam breathes into his fist. “It’s kind of fucked up.”

Dean is quiet, turning his face up to the rain. Sam is reminded of other nights, other nights that has never happened to him, not in _this_ life, nights spent under stars and nights spent cramped on the backseat of that car, nights spent in the cold outdoors with Dean the only warm thing around.

These are the things that he remembers, despite them not being his memories. These are the things he knows to be true, despite them not being true in his world.

 “In this world,” says Sam, asking the question he’s asked a million times, “whatever it is, what happened? What happened to me?”

Dean goes rigid. “You know I don’t like to talk about it.”

“You have to tell me. If _you_ ’ _re_ here…whatever you are—”

“You’re not. I don’t know. You—” Dean shakes his head, frantically. “Fucking angels, man.”

A flutter of fear again. Phantom, soft, like blunt nails scraping in vain at brick walls.

They sit, drenched, at the edge of the motel pool, and Dean tells him about their last hunt instead, their next hunt, that storm about to hit and strand them in the shoulder of a highway for a whole night. His feet skim the surface of the pool, his hands soft, star-fishing when they come to rest on Sam’s knees.

“You were so pissed at not having reception,” he says, fondly.

“Yeah, that sounds like me.”

Dean laughs. “Yeah. That’s what—I…You know, I believe you’re really him, sometimes. My Sam. That, when you’re here, we’re both…still here. Real. You know? Kicking ass, saving people, hunting things.”

“Couldn’t I be?”

Dean’s fingers press cold against Sam’s throat, like a remainder. “God, I’m glad you’re here. But much as I want to see you, Sammy,” says Dean now, serious. “Through whatever loophole this is that you’ve found…You shouldn’t really be here.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Dean sighs. “That’s what you always say.”

“I _will_ be.”

“Not always, Sam. You won’t be. This… _method_ you’ve found to see me isn’t, like, fucking sustainable.”

“I’m careful. I mean—he’s…he’s careful. With me.”

“The other me?”

“He’s not—he’s not _really_ you.”

“Couldn’t he be?”

“Don’t fucking twist my words, Dean.”

Dean shakes his head. “One day, you’ll have to stay.”

Sam looks at him. Dean—or one piece of him, at least, one ghostly fragment of him left here in this room—Dean, spread across the width and breadth of this vast country, images and story and song and lyric, like a map that might lead Sam to the whole of him; past life, or supernatural phenomenon, or alternate dimensions in parallel universes: something connecting him and Sam across time, across life and death. Ever since he’d started dreaming about Dean, nothing else has mattered. Not his job at Sandover, not the ghosts and demons that he and Smith sometimes hunt, not even Smith.

Dean’s the only thing that feels real. This otherworld that he exists in is the only thing that feels like reality. Everything else is just window dressing.

 “That’s—Dean, I _want_ to stay.”

“No, you don’t,” Dean presses his lips to the bruise at Sam’s throat, speaking into the shell of Sam’s ear, “You can’t. If you die, I don’t know where you’ll go. Where they’ll take you. You should—you should stop this. This is just stupid, Sammy. This is— _wrong_. You don’t have to do this, not for me.”

“I have to,” says Sam. What would he be without this to move forward to, without this reminder of what he is, or was, or was supposed to be? “I have to.”

*

They go further west. Sand, sand, sand—it drifts up and about and draws ghosts in the air. Sam weaves slightly, drowsy, the fabric of the desert unfolding all around them. Smith sleeps in the shotgun seat, shades drawn across his eyes, and Sam drives, the collar of his jacket turned up to hide the purpling bruises at his throat. The night blurs in surreal lines of neon colors and stretches of black, silken road.

He wakes Smith for dinner. They pick a diner that looks straight out of a post-apocalyptic movie, bombastic and neon-splattered. They all have names like _Last Rest,_ and then Sam drives further, and finds another _Last Rest._ Eternal competition to the end of the world.

Smith is quiet, staring at his food, not even picking up his spoon.

This is how all the afters are. Sam shifts in his seat, uncomfortable. There’s a game on the TV, and a ticker tape flashing some info about stocks. Sandover whips by, a couple of times, and Smith’s face settles into a thin, wan thing that looks like it could be peeled away by the arch of a nail.

His fingers shake on the salt-shaker. His grip is hard, like he’s holding his own against a tornado, and letting this go could unravel him. This is not what Smith expected, Sam’s sure. He probably expected an adventure, soul-deep satisfaction, a year’s sabbatical prepping him for a rounded career in the future. But now he’s probably looking back at their old lives, disappearing like salt into acid, sucked up by the awful blue solvent of the sky.

Maybe he could still go back. (And maybe Sam could still think of IT as a long-term option: who the fuck is he kidding?)

 “For a moment there,” says Smith, quietly, when the silence gets stifling, “I couldn’t—you wouldn’t wake. I thought you were dead.”

Sam looks down at his lime water.

“I had to hit you to restart your heart.”

“I’m—shit. I’m sorry, man.”

Smith looks at him like this is the funniest thing Sam’s ever said.

“You hate it. Why do you stay?”

Smith makes a line in a spill of salt, turns it into an arc. “Because,” he says. He chokes on whatever he wants to say, and settles for throwing Sam a sharp look instead. He picks up his fork, suddenly has eyes only for food.

Because _I can’t go back,_ Sam completes. Because _of you_.

Sam feels tension build in his shoulders. His synapses. He holds his breath, and terror jaunts through his insides—what if Smith leaves him? It’s like all the ghosts and all the demons and all the motels and all the waiting, choking, hunting has all been leading here.

But nothing happens. Yet.

When they go out again, into the cold night, stars swimming above them in the gluey sludge of sky, Smith grabs hold of Sam’s arm and pushes him up against a truck. Sam feels a shocky, jerk-vein pulse start at the small of his back where he slammed against metal. Pain lights his nerves. It travels everywhere, and so does Smith’s sudden, hard kiss.

He’s all teeth, and his hands braid into Sam’s hair, and his eyes are hard when he pulls back to look at Sam.

And for the first time in a long time, this reality is the only one that Sam thinks about. This life, this moment.

He’s all here, 100 percent, with Smith.

Smith kisses him again, and he sinks against the side of the trunk instead, pliant and boneless, and Smith’s fingers find his throat to press down against his bruises. The pain is ringing and cold, and Smith puts his mouth to it, as if he’s trying to kiss it and make it better.

He’s cold. Easy. Cold.

Dean is the same; feels the same.

The reminder is like an ice-cube, melting icily in his chest.

Sam pulls away, as softly as he can.

“I—I can’t,” he says. “I’m—I’m sorry, Smith, but I can’t.”

Smith’s mouth curls into a pained sneer.

“You don’t even fucking say my name,” he says. “Do you know that? You don’t even call me by my _name_.”

He walks away, and Sam watches him go, unfollowing.

Smith will only go as far as the car.

Sam knows—with the same certainty that he knows Dean is his anchor, scattered and in parts as he may be, dead or in another universe as he may be—that Sam is Smith’s gravity. The only thing that makes sense anymore. That there’s no _Eat, Pray, Love_ phase: he can’t go back now. Not with the memory of Sam’s pulse jack-rabbiting against his fingers.

He stands with his back to the truck, fingers at his throat, just breathing.

(All he probably needs to do, for Smith, is _breathe._ )

It starts to rain. Not like glitter. Like oil.


End file.
